2018 Women's March -- Thousands Across North Carolina

Boone, NC
January 20, 2018
Photo by Lonnie Webster

Winston-Salem, Corpening Plaza
Photo Walt Unks, Winston-Salem Journal

Asheville, Pack Square Park
Photo Carol Spagnuola, Asheville Citizen-Times

Uptown Charlotte
Photo Charlotte Observer

Lame-Duck Boone Town Council Poised To Do the Wrong Thing

During its last hour in office on December 21st, the current Boone Town Council (including all the members who were just kicked out of office on November 7th) is set to vote on a major give-away to Appalachian State University.

The proposed text amendment to the Unified Development Ordinance will allow ASU to rent any and all space (offices, storage, etc.) in the M1 (Manufacturing), B3 (General Business), and O/I (Office/Institutional) districts of the town. B3 is of particular concern because it includes so many existing buildings on all the main corridors.

This text amendment would allow the university to move in for long-term use (up to seven years with the possibility of further open-ended extensions -- see below), putting university functions including possibly classes all over the business districts without requiring the university to go through the normal procedures required for such consequential changes in use.

ASU is reportedly going to need a lot of space, like in a whole lot and more, because the Old Lowe's Building must be vacated and other demolitions and renovations are going to throw many faculty, staff, and whole programs with their required classes out into the town of Boone. The only use excluded for ASU in the B3, M1, and O/I districts will be residential.

This major adjustment to the town's already capacious accommodation to ASU has been moving quietly along the path to passage, with a Public Hearing last week that not many citizens knew about, though renters of empty property did know about it. During that public hearing one property owner stood up and said it's a fact that ASU already owns Boone, so why don't we just go ahead and make it official with this text amendment?

What Is Especially Pernicious About This Planned Vote

Under normal procedures, this text amendment would be voted up or down by the newly elected Boone Town Council, which will be sworn in at 5:30 on December 21 (barring Nathan Miller and Anne Marie Yates's ridiculous attempt to overthrow the election). But the current council -- Lynne Mason, Jeannine Underdown Collins, Charlotte Mizelle, Quint David -- with Loretta Clawson vigorously opposing the text amendment -- scheduled a "Special" session at 4:30 on December 21st, an hour before they're officially off the job. They clearly intend to vote this text amendment through while they still can.

Their rush to pass this before the new Council takes office speaks loudly, and the message is not flattering to the old Council.

What the University Wants, the University Gets

The very generous "planners" on the Boone Planning Staff wrote it into the text amendment that the university could have the rentals for three years with a one-time renewal for three more years, for a total of six years.

But the university wants more and has requested "through counsel" that the initial term be for five years with a two-year extension, and wanted this language added to prepare for going beyond those seven years: "An additional extension may be granted upon a showing of unanticipated and extraordinary circumstances" -- and there's no end to that "additional extension."

How does a university take over a town? With the willing collusion of a town council.

Watauga GOP Attempts To Nullify Municipal Elections

At 10 a.m. tomorrow morning (November 20), the Watauga Board of Elections (BOE) will conduct a preliminary finding of fact in response to Nathan Miller and Anne Marie Yates's election protest. The Miller-Yates team is asking for new elections because The Watauga Board of Elections did not sufficiently advertise the places for Early Voting.

Miller is vice chair of the Watauga Republican Party. Yates has been nominated to take a Republican seat on the Watauga BOE. They're leading the Watauga GOP in this action (and have a track record of harassment behind them: this and this).

My Own Findings of Fact

1. Voting was up in Boone in 2017 above 2015 -- 2,910 total votes in Boone Town Council races in 2015 versus 4,212 in 2017. Looks like people knew there was an election. And where to go.

2. It was the other Republican team of Nathan Miller-Bill Aceto that delayed announcement. Because Bill Aceto refused to approve the inevitable polling place inside the ASU Student Union -- the BOE vote was 2-1, with Aceto in the minority -- he then took his objection in a lawsuit to Wake Superior Court, and when that court thrashed Miller for the effort -- waving the Judge Donald Stephens order from 2014 in his face -- Miller-Aceto stomped off to the NC Court of Appeals and talked them into a temporary stay, which is not all that difficult and which was not lifted (inevitably) until the eve of Early Voting.

3. So do I have this right? Watauga Republicans block and delay the setting of Early Vote polling places until the courts order them at the last minute and then file to nullify the election because polling places weren't set early enough. Cool!

4. The Republican Party fielded no candidates in Boone in either 2015 or this year. Do they suddenly have some hot candidates they want to run in a re-do?

5. Or are they the termites eating the shelter?

6. Any action by the Watauga BOE tomorrow -- either finding just cause to nullify the election and call a new one or finding no just cause -- either one will take a unanimous vote. Aceto's with Miller, so you do the math.

7. What happens if there is no unanimous vote? Miller-Aceto can appeal to the State Board of Elections (SBOE), but the SBOE doesn't currently exist (thanks to monkeying with the law by Republicans in the General Assembly and the subsequent blocking court order), and the SBOE staff has limited power.

8. If also stymied at the SBOE, Miller-Aceto can always appeal to Wake County Superior Court. We'd almost pay money to attend that hearing.

Nullifying Boone's Town Elections

It would be a major shock if Dan Soucek and Jonathan Jordan's "local" bill to deprive the town of Boone of its ETJ did not pass the full NC House today, since it has already passed a second reading. The bill may already have passed by the time this gets posted.

What Soucek and Jordan have really done is nullify several elections in Boone that ratified steep slope regulations and other development rules, elections that also rejected candidates hand-picked by mega-developers, elections that made the town of Boone a progressive bastion in a sea of red and hence the object of intense conservative spite.

Legislators of the Soucek and Jordan ilk -- in other words, most of the Republican crop in Raleigh -- have been dedicated to crippling North Carolina's cities by any means necessary (the stealing of Asheville's water system is but one example among many). It's a stupid and ultimately counter-productive agenda, since our cities are also our major economic engine. What new or relocating business wants to establish itself in a town with bad schools and a ravaged environment, cluttered with cookie-cutter or ill-planned infrastructure? Maybe coal-ash ponds.

Legislators of the Soucek and Jordan ilk are also much into the idea of "nullification," simply ignoring or rejecting laws they don't like. Such ideological extremists do not like the land-use development rules ("zoning") implemented in cities, because development rules pinch the ambitions of people like the Templetons.

The Templetons have attempted to change the rules in Boone by selecting and campaigning for their own slates for the Boone Town Council, not once (as in 2013) but twice (as in 2007, in the famous "Citizens for Change" town elections). They lost both times. Unable to win at the ballot box, they've turned to their paid puppets in Raleigh, Soucek and Jordan, to accomplish for them what they could not accomplish on their own merits and through the democratic process.

Since the Tea Party take-over of our state in the elections of 2010, we've witnessed month after month such breathtaking acts of ideological extremism that have frankly beggared the imagination. Stripping Boone of its ETJ is now only the newest remarkable example of just how far this bunch is willing to go to drive our state back into a modern dark age. Boone is now the only -- the only -- city in the state to be singled out and treated in this high-handed and tyrannical way, all to suit the wishes of one wealthy family (and their wealthy friends).

The Law of Unintended Consequences
Throwing out steep slope and view shed rules on the mountains surrounding Boone was always just the first step. Getting Boone's water run up into those hills for student quadraplexes, etc. would be the next.

Boone is very short on water resources for new development and has been trying to obtain a new source on the New River in Ashe County for several years. The Templetons and other mega-developers want that water, and now, without development regs in the ETJ, they will use that water to support any new North Carolina Gatlinburg that they can imagine. And -- need we say it? -- they'll use their patsies Soucek and Jordan to enact another "local" bill in the General Assembly to simply seize the water from Boone. Count on it.

The Cottages is a Watauga County
development

Therefore, Boone needs to stop spending its taxpayers' money on the acquisition of a new water resource that will be taken away to enrich the special interests operating in the largely unregulated landmass known as Watauga County.

Kudos for Boone

Boone makes the Forbes list of fastest growing small towns in America.

Yep. Those dern librul Democrats have ruined everything!

The Downside of Good Intentions

Todd, N.C., residents near the South Fork of the New River are suspicious of Boone and intend to defend their waters from any poachers. That's understandable. But blind opposition to Boone's permit request to draw a maximum of 4 million gallons a day from a river that's flowing at a rate of 50 or 60 million gallons a day may cause them to shoot wildly into their own foot.

The progressive mayor and Town Council of Boone wants to do more than the law requires. That is, they want permission from the state to put the water intake completely out of sight in the riverbed, and out of the way of recreational users of the river.

For no particular nor logical reason that we can discern, the Todd area citizens united to fight this project want that special permission defeated, so that Boone would have to follow the minimum standards of water intake and put the piping structure in full view on the banks of the river.

In other words, if the opposition wins, they lose, and they'll get an uglier facility.

Not that the facility itself is the issue for them. It's the very idea of any town government anywhere in the known universe taking their water. Which, again, is humanly understandable, given the acquisitive assumptions of the species, but ultimately rather silly and ... self-defeating.

Templeton Lawsuit Against Town of Boone Dismissed

It happened back on May 25, but the judge didn't sign his order to make it official until today.

The Jeff Templeton lawsuit against the Town of Boone, challenging the constitutionality of the town's steep-slope development regs, was thrown out by Superior Court Judge Joseph N. Crosswhite (who's a Republican, incidentally) for failing to set out "facts or legal claims which showed any potentially valid basis under state law or the constitution."

This was the second lawsuit filed by Boone attorney Charlie Clement on behalf of Templeton to try to strike down the ordinances. The first attempt was voluntarily withdrawn by Clement in December 2006 just before it was to be heard in court, a move sometimes regarded as an admission of "I have no case."

The Watauga GOP Under Foxx Ownership

In today's Watauga Democrat, the column published under the name of the Watauga County Republican Party does not respond in any way to Hugh Sturgill's stinging critique on May 6 in the same newspaper that the local Republicans have been taken over by an intolerant far-right group led by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, her husband Tom, and her employee Aaron Whitener. Sturgill charged that these people have forced out anyone not as self-righteous as they.

(NOTE: Neither Sturgill's column nor this present one are included in the on-line content at WataugaDemocrat.com, under the apparent logic that if the paper publishes anything remotely interesting to read, you'll have to pay 50 cents to read it. Which is actually pretty good logic.)

As if to prove Sturgill's point, the column in Friday's paper doubles down on self-righteousness.

The column is signed by one "G. Oliver Parsons," who is supposedly a member of the Watauga County Republican Party. I put that name in quotation marks because no "G. Oliver Parsons" exists on the voter file of Watauga County, nor in the phone book, and his/her identity may be the pure figment of a Foxxian imagination. But it doesn't really matter. What he/she has to say matters.

"G. Oliver" pretty much confirms Sturgill's accusation that the local Republicans have no intention of broadening their base. Rather, the Watauga County Republican Party has decided to prove their relevance by attacking gays and gay-defenders.

In the editorial "G. Oliver Parsons" rails: HOW DARE the Boone Town Council, HOW DARE THEY – DEMOCRATS ALL! – fail to support a proposed bill in the N.C. Senate that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage!? (Apparently, people struggling for the right to get married are a huge threat to the institution of marriage.)

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

G. Oliver Parsons' reasoning, as far as we can follow it, is this: North Carolina, according to slanted polling by the Pope Civitas Institute, is knee-jerk bigoted against gays, and the mountain people of Watauga County are even more bigoted against gays, so HOW DARE THE BOONE TOWN COUNCIL not live up to the expectations of all those bigots!?

Subtext: The Boone Town Council will RUE the day, come November 3, when the voters of Boone will vote out the gay-loving Democrats and vote in the gay-hating Republicans.

We believe this particular editorial is the opening gun in the Republican campaign to convince Boone voters to turn over this little town to Republican control. Which, when you get right down to it, is every bit as brilliant as the rest of Madam Foxx's recent public utterances.

Good Day for a Parade

On the Watauga County Democratic Party float at today's Boone July 4th Parade.

Thanks, Gayle.

Marion Goes Wet

In case you missed the screaming parallels with the upcoming liquor-by-the-drink vote in Boone ... Marion, N.C., recently passed both liquor-by-the-drink sales AND beer sales within its city limits...

1. despite the opposition of a "formidable opposition group" calling itself Citizens for Faith and Family Values, led by two preachers, and a second group called Concerned Christians Against Beer Businesses, the leaders of which say they will now lead a boycott of businesses selling beer

2. despite the howls of outrage by McDowell County residents, who said it wasn't right that they weren't allowed to vote on whether Marion city could sanction liquor sales (reference the comments to the article linked above)

We haven't changed our personal leanings on this issue (against, for fastidiously complicated antediluvian reasons), but we'll be watching to see whether Marion sinks into the Pit of Everlasting Fire in time to offer an object lesson in native economics (you know what an economist is, right? Someone who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing).